


Pain

by Ray_Writes



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Laurel Lance is the Black Canary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 13:38:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19395253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ray_Writes/pseuds/Ray_Writes
Summary: The five years Oliver is away change drastically when his soulmate can feel all the same pain that he does, and vice versa.





	Pain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Unusual_Raccoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unusual_Raccoon/gifts).



> So a while back, I noticed unusul-raccoon had reblogged a list of soulmate AUs with the comment that there weren't many Lauriver ones that existed. I decided to try my hand at one, with a slightly different style than how I usually write. At any rate, I hope people enjoy!  
> (Side note: when reading Ted's lines, it might be helpful to picture an older guy rather than the actor Arrow cast. I wrote him with more of his comic characterization in mind, but it probably doesn't make or break the story if you do picture the Arrow actor.)

The problem is, her soulmate has never had a painful day in their life.

Not that there haven’t been little twinges here and there. The odd sting of a nonexistent paper cut, a groggy morning in a hungover state Laurel has done nothing the previous night to earn. But that could be anyone anywhere. It doesn’t give her any sort of certainty, so she doesn’t pay it much attention. She already knows who she loves: her boyfriend, Oliver Queen.

As it is, their combined sheltered lifestyles leave her woefully unprepared for when it all changes.

Laurel awakens in her childhood bedroom in the middle of the night with a jolt. She’s freezing, she’s falling, there’s nothing but inky blackness all around her. Somehow she cries out, or chokes, because her father comes racing in, grabbing hold of her.

“Laurel? Laurel, what’s wrong?”

But she can’t answer. She can’t get air. She is drowning, drowning on dry land—

With a great heave of breath, it lifts just enough. Laurel falls into her father’s arms, shaking and sobbing. What had that been? Why had it happened?

“I’m here, honey. You’re safe.”

“I’m o- I’m okay,” she manages, still gasping with every other breath.

“She’s breathing,” she hears her mother say, and it only just registers to her that her mom is on the phone. “It seems to have passed. What should we do until the paramedics arrive?”

“I don’t need paramedics,” Laurel protests weakly. She feels better mostly. Her shaking has calmed to just a shiver. It’s so cold in here.

“They’re already on their way, honey.”

“And for good reason. I’ve never been so terrified,” her dad remarks. He brushes some of her hair back. “Were you dreaming? A nightmare?”

“I don’t know.”

The paramedics don’t know either. They check her over and give her parents some vague instructions. Her dad insists on sitting up in her room the rest of the night to make certain there would be no repeat of whatever had happened.

The next day she gets up and tries to go about things as normal to ease her parents’ worries. She feels fine, aside from a parched throat that doesn’t seem to be quenched by any amount of water and a growing hunger in her belly despite the breakfast and lunch she eats.

Laurel volunteers to help her dad with the dishes while their kitchen television plays on in the background, and that is how she gets the news: the  _ Queen’s Gambit _ has gone down in a storm.

Mrs. Queen arrives sometime after with even worse to tell them. There were no survivors, and her own sister had been on the yacht. She’d snuck off to be with Oliver. His last act had been to cheat on her.

Whatever strange pains she had been going through are nothing compared to the weight of that betrayal. Laurel can’t believe it. She’d known about Oliver’s playboy tendencies, but how could he do this to her when they’d been planning a life together? And with her own  _ sister. _ How could Sara?

They hold a quiet funeral with family only and an empty casket. It was shameful the way Sara had died, after all, and not many are interested in claiming her as a friend. Her mother sobs the whole way through and nothing her father does or says can seem to console her. Not that he’s in a good state to do so.

Laurel is numb. Just numb to it all. She goes down to the docks where she’d said goodbye to Oliver, where he’d acted like nothing was different, and stares out at the ocean that had taken two of the most important people in her life away. She looks up statistics, research about shipwrecks. Surely there’s some way  _ someone _ lived? But there’s nothing.

What else is there to do but go back to her classes?

Laurel keeps her head down the first couple of days. Everyone knows what happened, that she is the one who lost her sister and boyfriend while they’d been screwing each other behind her back. She can hear whispers wherever she walks and feel the stares on her back. All she can do is ignore it; it has to go away after a while.

Only a day or so later comes the next incident, just as she’s walking down the steps of the lecture hall. Pain erupts in her chest, and Laurel screams in anguish as it rips through her.

She doesn’t know anything for a time, only dimly coming back to herself in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, classmates and the professor standing over her with looks of alarm and even fear. The pain is still there, and she doesn’t have words to describe what it is.

By the time it’s dull ache, her father has arrived.

“What happened?”

“I don’t- I don’t know, Daddy. But it hurt so much.”

He takes her to their family doctor who refers them to a specialist. During the wait for that, she suffers another attack, though not nearly as painful.

“In the absence of any physical wound, I would have to assume your daughter has a soulmate connection.”

“But this has never happened before,” her father protests.

“Then it’s likely that her soulmate’s circumstances have changed.”

“Well isn’t there a drug, something that dampens that connection?”

“I’m afraid those are very closely regulated. We would need the confirmed identity of her soulmate.” The doctor turns to her. “Miss Lance, do you think you might know them?”

Laurel has been thinking it over. The first night this happened would have been the night the  _ Gambit _ went down. “I think, maybe...Oliver?”

_ “Queen?” _ Her father practically screams. “That good for nothing? He’s dead, Laurel, he’s at the bottom of the ocean. And it’s the one bit of happiness I’ve got left to cling to anymore! Now you better hope it’s somebody else!”

They go home in stony silence with no treatment plan and Laurel trying to hold back tears.

Laurel doesn’t know what she wants. If Oliver is alive — but then, wouldn’t he have reached out to his family? Wouldn’t any survivor have reached out?

She loved him. She can’t imagine finding that with another person. But she’s found something with someone, apparently.

Why did it have to hurt so much?

—-

The problem is, he’s in so much pain on his own that it takes some time to notice it. Or rather to separate it out.

It starts a few days after the  _ Gambit _ was torn apart, some time when he was drifting alone towards the island. Oliver thought the ache in his chest, the hurt, the betrayal, was a result of his father’s confession and subsequent suicide. How could he leave him alone like this to fend for himself? Why had he made him watch?

Yet it persists. After he meets Yao Fei, after he joins Slade at the fuselage, after they rescue Shado. This constant gnawing loneliness that eats at him remains. The brief moments of what counts for levity on Lian Yu don’t chase it away. Sometimes it felt like he’d never been plucked from the North China Sea and into the life raft, like he’s still drowning out in those dark waters.

As the months drag on, he thinks he hears things in his sleep. Grumbled curses and oaths, his own name.  _ If you hadn’t met him. _

In those times he seeks out company — though he doesn’t dare tell the others he thinks he’s hearing things — or takes to staring at the photo he’d managed to hang onto of Laurel for some kind of solace. How can someone possibly be expected to live like this?

It isn’t until Sara arrives on the island that he realizes that someone else out there in the world somewhere  _ is. _

“You didn’t feel anything, did you? Any of what they did to me.” Her voice is pitched low as they sit around a pitiful fire. Slade is off somewhere like he’s taken to doing ever since the Mirakuru. Ever since they lost Shado.

Oliver blinks and looks up. “No.”

“Neither did I.” Her lip trembles. “Ollie, I thought I loved you. I thought we were soulmates. What- what did we do?”

It crashes over him in an instant. He hadn’t felt Sara’s pain, but he is feeling someone else’s. And who could be so hurt, so alone—

He doesn’t want to hope somehow it’s her he’s so connected to, and he doesn’t want to wish that this kind of pain belongs to her.  _ Laurel. _ Lord, what has he done?

—-

The solution is to fight through the pain.

She has to withdraw from law school after the third time she’s hospitalized. Her condition is too unstable, too distracting to other students, the university says. She looks at online programs, none of which seem particularly promising.

Without a prescription from a doctor that would lessen some of the effects, Laurel turns to alternatives. At first it’s alcohol. But as her own father’s dependence on the substance worsens, Laurel finds herself not as keen to indulge. She doesn’t like the person it makes him, the person slurs his words and slings insults at her even as she supports half his weight on the way home. Home is a cramped apartment now that her mother has disappeared into thin air.

A friend from law school who’s interested in working internationally puts her onto the idea of meditation and body movement. She starts taking classes at cheap dojos in the Glades. The meditation and martial arts helps to calm her, ground her focus. But nothing feels quite as good as punching at something until her arms ache. That eventually leads her to the Wildcat Gym.

Ted is a good teacher. He doesn’t ask too many questions, and when he does he doesn’t mind if you don’t want to answer them. Laurel has to tell him about the soulmate situation in case she suffers another attack of pain in the middle of training, but he doesn’t freak out. 

So far they’ve gotten lucky. Sometimes she feels a soreness or a twinge here or there in the middle of a combination. Once, she has to drop to a knee, her hand bracing over her shoulder at an explosion of pain. It feels like her skin and bone have been shattered into pieces. Ted takes her other hand and tells her to breath. She does, in and out, and before it even starts to dull Laurel climbs back onto her feet and raises her fists. “Let’s go.”

Her soulmate seems to be coping with whatever they’re going through better with time as well. Whether that is because their situation is improving or they have simply increased their pain tolerance, she doesn’t know. Laurel hopes their suffering will be at end soon, for both their sakes. No one deserves to go through that, not even—

But whoever they are and wherever they are, Laurel is running out of her savings here in Starling City. She can’t hold onto a regular nine to five job thanks to her condition, and she had to sell her downtown apartment for a smaller duplex in the Glades. That section of the city is in a severe downward slump, with cops and reporters alike unable to keep up with the rate of crime. People out there actually getting hurt, unlike the phantom pain that haunts her.

And that gives her an idea, especially once she hears the neighborhood legend of the Wildcat himself.

“They’re somewhere out there, Ted. My soulmate. And there have been so many near misses. What if they don’t make it? What if they die? What happens to me?”

“Hey, that’s what you’re training for. So you can handle whatever life throws at you.”

“What if I want to do more? I took this training on to help me, but I could be helping others like you did.”

Ted takes a lot of convincing. He doesn’t want to get into it, and Laurel doesn’t pry, but a past experience with a student didn’t go well. But eventually, he comes around. In the meantime, Laurel starts putting together a nighttime disguise, as Ted explains she’ll need if she’s planning to go outside the law.

Maybe in the past she would have felt guilty for doing so. But Laurel has been denied the side of the law too many times, and she is tired of sitting around wallowing in her own wounds. This, too, is a way to fight back. A way to try and hold the world together, if not save it.

Sometimes at night she thinks she can sense a comforting presence, a soothing voice telling her it will all be okay somehow. With few friends left in her life, it helps to ease the loneliness just a little. Whether or not she is crazy to buy into that feeling, Laurel doesn’t mind holding onto a little hope.

—-

The solution is to find the bright side.

Oliver knows that if he lets himself wallow in the darkness that hangs over his soulmate like a cloud, he will never make it home. He has to force himself to think of the good things, for both their sakes.

He takes to listing all of the positives of each day. He found food. He learned a new grammar rule in Mandarin. Thea will be entering high school, provided his math is correct. His soulmate is still alive. Somehow, impossibly, it makes his situation seem less bleak.

It helps him to hold onto who he was, as well. Not that there had been many redeeming qualities to his character before he’d been shipwrecked, but it’s nice knowing Waller and her missions can’t completely change him. Even if his humor has turned more biting than it had once been, his grins sharper.

People he comes across tend to say he is unnaturally cheerful given the circumstances, that it just isn’t appropriate. They don’t understand this is the only way he is going to get through this, that he is just trying to keep his head above water. And the truth is, the more he thinks about it, he doesn’t want to go through life all dour and appropriately serious anyway. What’s the point of it all if he can’t find a bright side?

Sometimes when things go south and he finds himself in a fight for his life, he feels a reserve of energy he doesn’t normally have rise up and take control. His fists become more coordinated, his moves more practiced, and it gets him through to another day. He has a guess as to where it comes from, but no way of knowing for sure.

Because he has started to feel things. A broken nose, bruises that aren’t his own. Part of him wonders if this is an attempt at payback for the hell he is no doubt putting his soulmate through unwillingly. Another part of him worries they’ve been inspired to enter a life of similar risk.

As much pain as his soulmate is in, they are also his only link to a world outside the island or the crazy missions Waller forces him to take part in. If he loses that, it’d be a lot harder to feel as though there are still good things to be happy about. What if he is the reason they do something that causes him to lose them?

If he can just hang on and make it home, then he can set things right. As much as his father’s mission matters to him, he needs to take care of this, too. He doesn’t want to feel his soulmate suffering in solitude for another day. They need each other.

—-

The result is it becomes impossible to maintain secret identities.

Oliver Queen returns home, and a man in a green hood shows up to attack Adam Hunt. The night of his welcome back party, Laurel finds herself having to hide behind a table and brace a hand over her mouth to hold in grunts of pain from blows being delivered only the next building over. 

The woman in black who stalks the Glades runs into a little trouble with a street gang later in the week, and Oliver has to stop his construction of his base thanks to the slice of a knife and other unpleasantries.

She feels it when his kidnappers taser him. He feels it when he tells her to stay away from him for her safety.

When they finally collide down at the docks — her after the Triad and him after their business partner Martin Sommers — they make short work of their opponents together, though not without retaining some injuries.

“You okay?” Laurel asks her newfound partner.

“Yeah, just my nose,” he says, pressing fingers lightly to a perfectly straight nose just as he turns to see blood running from hers. “I mean, uh—”

He gestures vaguely to her face, and Laurel reaches to feel at the tender spot, her hand coming away red. “Oh. I thought that was—”

Their eyes meet, and everything is clear.

“It’s you,” Laurel breathes, and no greasepaint or hood or mask or wig or any obstruction can hide one from the other. She steps closer. “Ollie.”

“Well I’ll be.” He takes in those familiar green eyes, feeling himself falling all over again. “Dinah Laurel Lance.”

Approaching police sirens cut them off, and they flee, somehow ending up in her duplex. He takes down his hood, and she sets aside her mask, the two of them looking and really seeing each other for perhaps the first time.

He puts a dish towel under the faucet and holds it out to her. “May I?”

She nods, stepping forward. Laurel approaches him carefully. She knows, after all, how wary he’s had to become of any sudden movement.

He takes her chin with one hand, wiping gently at the drying blood with the towel. It’s not as bad as it looks, and as he clears it away something pleasant seems to tingle through them both. Healing, they can only guess.

“I always wondered if you were still out there. If what I was feeling was you.” Laurel murmurs.

When he looks back up after discarding the towel, she’s silent, only taking one final step to wrap her arms around him. She hasn’t let herself be this gentle or vulnerable with anyone in so long. All the walls she put up to keep out the hurt, and they’re coming down.

“I did this to you — to us,” he reminds her. All the pain, the loneliness, it could have been avoided if he’d only known.

Laurel just holds him close. She knows what he’s thinking, too. “We had to learn it first.”

“Yeah. Yeah, we did.”

Without the pain, there isn’t this. This sweet peace found in each other’s presence, the soothing balm to all the years spent apart.

“Finally.”


End file.
